


To the Stars

by airdeari



Series: self-indulgent aoilight within [19]
Category: Zero Escape (Video Games)
Genre: Domestic Fluff, M/M, Marriage Proposal
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-01-19
Updated: 2020-01-19
Packaged: 2021-02-27 04:47:26
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,258
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/22321309
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/airdeari/pseuds/airdeari
Summary: “Hey babe, take a look at this.”He tapped Light’s arm, and Light raised his hand. Aoi turned his palm up and dropped something small and warm into it.
Relationships: Light Field/Kurashiki Aoi
Series: self-indulgent aoilight within [19]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/546013
Comments: 7
Kudos: 67





	To the Stars

“Hey babe, take a look at this.”

He tapped Light’s arm, and Light raised his hand. Aoi turned his palm up and dropped something small and warm into it.

Light traced it with his thumb. It was round, and with another turn he ascertained that it was metal, likely warmed by the heat of a pocket or hand, though he could not rightly say whose among the din of mingling guests. The center was hollow, through too narrow for more than the very tip of his thumb to fit through. There, he twisted it, pressing gently with the pads of his thumb and his forefinger to read the texture of the metalwork. There was something engraved on the inside, and an intricate winding around the outside.

“A ring?” Light said, when he could find nothing more to identify it.

As he held out the ring to return it to Aoi’s hand, he gave it one last turn between his fingers and found familiarity in the inner pattern. He did not recognize it at first touch because braille was usually embossed, not engraved.

He did not find Aoi’s hand.

“Aoi?”

In the silence, he spun the ring again. The letters did not make sense; he tried to find a start to the circle that made meaning but could not. He flipped the ring from his thumb to his index finger to turn it upside down, and spun again, and—

“Okay, the reason I ain’t sayin’ anything is ’cuz soon as I do, you’re gonna figure out I’m on one knee right now.”

—it slipped off of his fingertip.

With a strained exhale too little like a laugh to be rightly called one, Aoi dampened the clatter of the ring hitting the hardwood floor with his hand. “Jeez, at least let me talk first,” he huffed. “Before you… if you’re gonna say… y’know.”

Light all but tipped over forward, his trembling hands reaching in the direction of the ring. “Aoi,” he choked.

“Shut up. Just, shut up. Don’t say a word. Let me finish.”

Light snapped his hanging jaw closed. From nearby, he heard his sister laughing into her hand, and another woman taking in a soft gasp—he thought it must be Akane.

They were at her and Junpei’s house for the holidays, something that was growing dangerously close to an annual tradition. Aoi, Light, and Clover were always in attendance, as was Sigma, most often with at least part of his strange little family—Diana had missed a couple of parties for nursing shifts, and Phi had spent last year studying abroad. Despite his own hectic schedule, Carlos always carved time out to visit for the party—or perhaps it was more accurate to say that Junpei and Akane carved the time to fit him—and Maria herself had accompanied him to the last few parties as well. Alice had made her own rare appearances, as did Seven, Lotus, and the Kashiwabara twins. As luck would have it, all of them were present the night that Aoi’s voice came to Light from just above a knee’s height from the floor, holding a ring in his hand.

“You all shut up, too,” Aoi said to these witnesses. “ **I got a whole… shit I gotta say.** Nobody say anything.”

Clover muffled a squeal, and there was a bounce of feet from where Light had last heard the twins. All else had fallen under Aoi’s requested silence.

Aoi exhaled, slow but unsteady, as if trying to dampen the sound of a sigh. Light felt heat under his outstretched hand, and he moved to meet Aoi’s fingers. Despite the warmth it emitted, his skin was cool to touch, clammy from a nervous sweat, as he clenched Light’s palm with rigid strength.

“ **I know this probably isn’t your thing,** ” he muttered. “ **Big, public thing, actually getting down on one knee** to fuckin’ beg you to—to gimme a chance here. A ring with fucking braille on it. **Fuck. It’s cheesy. I—I don’t know what I’m doing, honestly. I just…** ”

“Aoi—”

“ _Shut_ it. I’m serious.”

It showed in the grip of his hand, which had clenched so tight that Light’s fingertips began to prickle from blood loss, and again as Aoi let his fingers go just a little bit lax.

“ **You know how much you make me,** ” he said. “I’m… **I’m not nothing without you, but I’m everything _with_ you. I’m someone who wants to be better than I was yesterday, for me, for you, for everyone I love. I’m through some of the hardest shit in my life because you were there beside me. And sometimes I—I think I see myself bringin’ out something good in you, and that’s… even better than being any good myself. That means every day, I wake up loving you even more than yesterday. I thought that whole cliché was bullshit until I saw it happening, and that’s how I know I _have_ to…**”

Aoi ran out of breath here, and the strain of his voice showed much too vulnerable when there was not enough air in it.

After a shaky inhale, Aoi whispered, “ **God, it’s good to look up at you like this.** I fuckin’… **I don’t even know how to say how much I love you.** ”

Lucky for Light that Aoi had forbidden him from speaking, because he had been rendered speechless.

“ **I just wanna give you what you deserve, even if you don’t think you want it,** ” Aoi said. “ **Nice shit. A nice proposal. Nice wedding. Nice house of our own. A… a husband, if you… yeah.** ”

“Not a ‘nice’ one, I hope,” Light murmured.

“Shut up. What?”

Light fought down a smirk, because it trembled at the corners in a way that threatened to summon tears. “Not a _nice_ husband,” he repeated.

Aoi’s hand twitched in his. “That’s what I’m—I know. If you don’t want—”

“Aoi, ask me.”

“What?”

“Ask me the question inside the ring.”

There, Aoi made that same not-quite-a-laugh sound, like the last puff of air cutting loose from a deflated balloon. He took back his hand, exchanging Light’s flesh-and-blood right hand for his left. He held their palms pressed flat together, the cool, hard pressure of the ring positioned at the base of the fingers where a row of sensors were most accurate.

“Light Field,” he said, “ **will you marry me?** ”

* * *

“I keep worrying it will fall off and I won’t feel it,” Light confessed, twisting the ring with the most reverent of idle touches known to man.

“I literally stole your hand while you were sleeping and measured it. It fits just right. You’re fine.”

“What stones are these?”

“What, you can’t tell by touchin’ ’em?”

“The ruse with the wood grain is a just party trick, love.”

“Then they’re diamonds.”

“Mmm. Cubic zirconia, then?”

“Nah, they’re really diamonds. Lab-grown, but still. Figured you’d like ’em ethical better than you’d like ’em… shiny, or whatever’s supposed to be better about natural ones.”

Light rubbed the traitorous, twitching corner of his lip that kept threatening to rise too high. “Your figuring was correct,” he said.

“Metal’s eighteen-karat gold. Color looks best on you,” Aoi added. “It’s got the carving on the outside, but… that’s for you. You can feel that.”

Light had pressed his fingerprints around the twisting boughs that built his ring many times now. He felt heat in his cheeks as silence lingered, aware of Aoi’s attention on his hands.

“You like it?”

“I love you.”

“That’s not what I asked.”

“But it’s the answer.”

**Author's Note:**

> So you may be wondering why certain passages were bolded in this little pseudofinale to my monolith of aoilight, and to explain that, I’ll need to tell a quick story about the person who’s in my mind every time I write Light Field, who’s long and pale and lean, with an air of elegance and poise, who has not only a penchant but also a deep drive for music and musicality, and under that beautiful, alluring veneer, they’re full of snark and wit, their humor so black and dry that it’s hard to make them laugh, but when they do, when that joy rips through all their layers, they shine with a smile I can’t capture in a photograph, can’t describe in words, and so I just want to bring them all around with me and share with the world their smile, their joy, our joy, our love.
> 
> Aster, I know I won’t be able to get out all the words I wanted to say about you when I’m on one knee before you, because I’ll probably end up trying to make you laugh again, so I wrote them down here. But come find me. I’ve got more I want to tell you, and I have something to give you, if you’ll have it.
> 
> **UPDATE: THEY SAID YES**


End file.
